Apr 082010
 

It was only inevitable that she’d want to meet one day. The Greyhound was scheduled to arrive on a Thursday evening in March of 2004, and I must have been excited for her arrival because in my journal that day at work, I wrote: Christina is coming. I’m excited.

The bus got to Pittsburgh before I was done with work, so I told her to walk down the street to Eide’s, which is one of my favorite music stores in all of the land. I figured there’d be enough for her to look at, plus it would give me a reason to have to go there. Not that I ever needed a reason.

Henry pulled up along the curb and waited in the car while I ran inside.

I saw her immediately. And was taken aback.

Friends, I know that sometimes people can be quite slick with their self-photography, but Christina was clearly a master magician, her medium being cleverly forgiving angles. I am not a shallow person. I have never been embarrassed to be seen with any of my friends. For Christ’s sake, I’ve been parading Henry all around town since 2001! But I guess there’s always an exception to everything because I felt my face grow warm and couldn’t stop thinking that she looked like a troll. That’s horrible, right? I just wasn’t prepared for this; I don’t know if I thought she was going to be taller? Would that have made a difference? She was concentrated into a squat stature and short tightly-curled brown hair framed her big duck-lipped face. I don’t really know how else to describe her, and the way I felt seeing her for the first time. I could extrapolate, but then I run the risk of sounding mean just for the sake of being mean.

Hugging her in the middle of the store, in front of the entire two customers, I instantly felt like an asshole for having that moment of superficiality. But still, I broke apart from her embrace and led her outside to the car, where I flashed Henry with a saucer-eyed look of alarm. I knew he was internally gloating, as he always did when one of my Internet meet-ups went awry.

Driving across the Liberty Bridge, Christina leaned between the seats and said, “Here. Put this on,” as she handed over a mix CD. It was full of emo, pop-punk, mostly stuff I didn’t listen to as I was in the throes of my pretentious indie/dance-punk/post-punk/no-wave phase.

“Fuck, we have nothing in common,” I realized.

We drove straight to Denny’s, as none of us had eaten dinner yet. Christina entertained with stories of the scandalous Greyhound underworld, while I inhaled my veggie burger.  I noticed that she didn’t do so much eating of her food, but pushed it around a lot on the plate, and then excused herself to go to the restroom. It was the first chance I got to ask Henry what he thought of her.

“She seems nice, very out-going,” he said with a mouthful of burger and semen. (No really, that’s the mayo in Henry’s land.)

“Yeah, she wasn’t quite what I was expecting visually-speaking, but she makes me feel comfortable. I like her,” I agreed, thinking that it was odd I wasn’t stuttering in front of her or using my fake Nice Erin voice. There was a vibe about her that disabled my social awkwardness and allowed me to behave the way I would around people I’ve known for years. And you know, not stiff and reserved like I tend to get around people for the first time.

While Henry slept that night, we stayed up late talking on the couch about everything, including painful childhood traumas. I found that, in person, she was just as easy to confide in as she was that night over the phone, only this time she shared extremely personal details with me as well. Eventually, she had tears streaming down her face. “I never talk about this shit with anyone,” she admitted.

I feel like this isn’t the first time I’ve met her,” I wrote later in my journal.

***

Christina’s visit was smack in the middle of the Great Pregnancy Scare of ’04. While I was at work the next day, she took a walk around my neighborhood and bought me flowers at a local florist. Beneath the standard “Congratulations!” on the card, she had written “Hope you get your period!” A bouquet of flowers was not exactly what I was expecting to come home to that Friday, not from Henry and especially not from a girl. Henry didn’t seem very delighted by this, and left to pick up his sons, Blake and Robbie, who spent every other weekend with us at the time.

Sylvia evidently wasn’t very delighted either.  Her girlfriend (they were in their 16th go-around at this point) had run off to Pittsburgh to meet the strange blond chick she was always hitting on via LiveJournal comments. I asked Christina what the deal was with that, why Sylvia was so jealous.

“She thinks we’re going to make fun of her,” Christina said disgustedly, with an eye roll.

“Well, we have been.” And we laughed.

Christina had updated her LiveJournal while I was at work that day, stating that she had taken a walk “a la Gothic Carl.” (She was actually confusing Gothic Carl with Big Headed Gordon, who, during his visit, would leave my house surreptitiously to walk around the neighborhood;  I had told her about both of them the night before.)

And this is what Sylvia wrote in her’s:

Its hard because right now Christina is with “gothic
Carl” I am sure that it is not anyone but the fact
that she is with someone I have never heard of,
instead of me, makes me jealous. Is that so wrong? I
think it is. Some times I think she is just trying to
see if I get jealous. My bet is he is just one of
[Henry’s] kids or something. MAYBE it is the friend of
Erin’s that Christina told me about, that was going to
come over and meet her. But I would think that that
person was going to come over when she was there too.
Is Erin trying to hook Christina up with someone else?
What if Erin knows about her true feelings about me?

What if Christina does not like me as much as I think
she is starting to? I need to stop. I know that
Christina cares and loves me. I know that no matter
what we will always be a friend even though that is
what Erin is trying to do. * Sighs*

This, after Christina had spent an hour talking – nay, swooning – about her younger sister’s friend Steve, how she was secretly in love with him and that’s how she knew she wasn’t a lesbian. That she and Steve would secretly fuck behind locked doors and once, her sister almost caught them.

That was the part about Christina that was frustrating, even back then. It was like she was so ashamed of herself, who she really was. She wasn’t yet to the point where she could look at herself in the mirror and say, “You know what, I like girls. It doesn’t define me. The end.” So she was constantly trying to convince everyone that even though she had this rag doll named Sylvia, she was completely hetero.

“Have you ever thought that maybe you’re bisexual?” I asked.

“No, I’m sure I’m straight. I’m in love with Steve.” She said it with such certainty, and we moved on from there. I’m nobody’s therapist and it didn’t affect me one way or the other. I don’t choose friends based on their sexual preferences, but I just wanted her to be OK with herself because it seemed to be a topic that came up every time we talked.

That night, things got light-hearted again when Janna and my brother Corey came over to meet Christina. Corey was going through this stage where he was obsessed with playing a didgeridoo so he brought that with him and performed for us. Only, no one was allowed to watch him play.

Since it was Christina’s first time in Pittsburgh, we took two cars to Mt. Washington: Henry and his kids in one; Janna, Christina, Corey and me in the other.

Mt. Washington is directly across the river from downtown river, providing the best unobstructed views of the skyline, bridges and Heinz Field if you’re into that football shit.

Plus, there are two inclines which is always fun for idiots like me to board and commence acting out a scene from the yet-to-be-written DoucheBag’s Big Day Out.

Typically, it’s me acting out while my friends are inching away, embarrassed to be associated with me. My giddiness is oftentimes confused with extreme public intoxication, resulting in Henry gripping my elbow and dragging me back to the car.

But instead of shying away from this behavior, Christina joined in. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this would wind up being her first of many gigs as my sidekick. And of course, Henry’s kids (who were only 10 and 12 at the time, I think) were acting a fool too, and Henry was so completely pissed off.

I wanted a group photo, so we all pushed and shoved each other, trying to position ourselves around some stupid memorial on one of the overlooks. Someone walked past and said to Henry, “Here, let me take that for you so you can get in the picture, too.”

“I’m not with them,” Henry muttered.

meetingchristinaOn the way back to the car, Christina performed for Henry’s kids and Corey one of the raps she had written. I wasn’t paying attention but Corey told me later that it was directed to a man, and it was about stealing his girlfriend from him.


Mar 312010
 

2003 went out with a horribly traumatic bang for me. There were a bunch of us at my mom’s house for New Years Eve, and somehow Henry and I wound up on opposing Trivial Pursuit teams. I can’t remember–or maybe it’s more that I won’t remember–the gritty details, but there might have been a skirmish between Henry and me revolving around the video game character Yoshi, and perhaps it culminated in me lunging at him from across the top of my mom’s coffee table while all my friends watched with scared eyes as I called him a mother fucker amongst a shimmering array of death threats that all but came out in the backwards tongue of Satan.

That’s the thing with us bi-polars: you toss us in a roomful of people, some of whom we’re only pretending to like; place a bevy of alcholic choices at our finger tips; top it off with the element of intense competition and watch our tops blow, mother fuckers.

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It starts off with nervous laughter, always. But it escalates, inexplicably and fast, like having your thalamus double-fisted by Charles Manson. It was a scene. Quite embarrassing after the fact, but while it was playing out, all I could comprehend was: I was PISSED, I was HURT, no one CARED, and I wanted to fucking KILL myself.

I drove home drunk that night. No one bothered to stop me, no one seemed to care at all, really. In fact, before I left, I overheard my mom griping to my friends, “Ugh, she always does this shit.”

Sometime after I got home that night, after I staggered through the door and collapsed in a pathetic Sybil-esque heap on the couch, Henry called me from my mom’s house and instead of asking how I was doing (NOT WELL, thanks for not asking), he had the audacity to say, “Your friend Lisa is really pissed off at you. You ruined her night.”

That right there? That caused me to hurl the cordless phone into the decorative fireplace that has pissed me off since I moved into this house in 1999 because in whose world is a fireplace a DECORATION? It’s a heat source, you fucking interior designing cunts.

It was a low point in my life. Maybe the lowest, but there are a few contenders for that title. I cried a lot. Quit talking to Lisa. Began reevaluating my other friendships and even my relationship with Henry. I knew I needed to talk to someone, probably (definitely) someone with a sturdy psych degree. But for now, at that moment, I needed a friend more than someone spouting off clinical “How does that make you feel?” ‘s and prescriptions for tiny blue pills.

That’s how I knew I was alone, as I sat on the couch a few days later and scrolled through the numbers in my phone. “I don’t want to talk to any of these assholes,” I thought. And then I remembered Christina, how she was always so supportive in the comments she left on my LiveJournal entries, how she went to Bible College. And maybe that was the kind of person I needed to talk to. Someone who had Christ on her side.

So I called her. I let it all out. I don’t open up very easily, if at all, yet I found myself I telling her things I never would have admitted to a therapist or any of those people programmed into my phone. We spoke of my abandonment issues, and how that past New Years Eve exemplified my fears. We spoke of my Pappap and my ability to consistently feel alone even in a crowded room.

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We spoke of everything that mattered. And instead of telling me what she thought I wanted to hear, she did something better: she made me feel understood, cared about, unalone. For the first time in a long time, I remembered what it felt like to have a friend. Sharing psychological horrors with a near-stranger will do that, I guess. But moreso, what I realized was that she was no longer laying on that bombastic persona with me. She sounded real now when we spoke on the phone. She wasn’t coating her words with smarmy humor and squirting the conversation with a creamy braggadocio filling; instead, the phony game show host voice was retired in favor for her true sincerity and I liked this girl.

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This was the Christina with whom I wanted to be friends, and hanging up with her day, I was suddenly very thankful to have met someone as fucked up as myself.

And it was completely unexpected, like scoring an STD after having protected sex and shouting at the doctor, “But I didn’t think it could happen to me!?”

Mar 242010
 

On May 23, 2003 I posed a very important question for LiveJournal.

I had just edited Henry’s Friendster profile to enhance his more homoerotic qualities and within an hour, someone had suggested a match for him. However, Henry had already begun taking a liking to our new neighbor, Chris. So I asked LiveJournal to choose for him, since his head was practically smoking with indecision.

jonny henryslover2

Jonny or Chris, OMG?

I received this comment from one “chunkstyle4”:

i’d pick jonny… but only because he looks like the kind of person who would hunt out people with the similar intrest [sic] of “teresa strasser”… comment to a journal that intrested [sic] him and ask if he could add them.

ok- so he’s a little like myself. too much infact [sic].
i change my vote to chris.

At least she spelled “too” correctly.

Teresa Strasser was the host of a since-canceled TLC show called “While You Were Out” and apparently I was one of two or three people who had her listed as an interest on LiveJournal. That’s how Christina found me. So thank you kindly, Teresa Strasser.

I added her back and the first LJ post of hers that I read was about how this girl Sylvia wouldn’t stop emailing her. How annoying this Sylvia was. How she wished she never met Sylvia. The comments on that post said things like, “Just stop talking to her! She’s just a stupid little girl!”

I admit that I usually skipped over her posts. Mostly she would brag about being high, complain about her job, talk about God. Nothing that interested me. She would write these juvenile sex poems and constantly complain about how lonely she was, even though she was supposedly in a relationship with this Sylvia girl. She’d post emails from Sylvia, and follow it with commentary like:

“well- i want to hit her over the head and say “I DON’T LIKE YOU!!!”

“she has about as much depth as a crepe.”

“i’m obviously not going to ever give her what she needs or wants and i knew a long time ago, she could never meet my needs.”

Reading these things made me uncomfortable. Why stay with someone who made you so disgusted? Why sit there and whine about how lonely you are when you hold the key that will detach that ball and chain from your ankle? Meanwhile, she was all but sexing me via comments on my LiveJournal posts. Anytime I’d jokingly write about Henry doing something wrong, Vegas would go wild with their bets on Christina dropping a lesbian-in-shining-armor comment.

I didn’t mind it. But my friend Keri was repulsed by this. “She’s trying to make you gay!” Keri would spit over the phone. “I can’t stand it when she comments on your stuff.” But as someone who has developed girl crushes before, the idea of e-flirting with some strange girl was kind of fun. And there were times when she would say things that really picked me up after a shitty day. She always seemed to be right there, lurking in the wings, reaching out to me when no one else would. So through LJ comments, we became closer. By that fall, we had tried to be pen pals, which was really me sending her letters and mixed CDs and her promising to write back, but instead she always trying to chat with me on AIM and coax my number out of me.

“We should talk on the phone sometime,” she proposed one day. I thought this was a horrible idea. I barely talked on the phone at all with people I actually knew in person, and I couldn’t imagine having to struggle through a phone conversation with some strange girl from Cincinnati. But I obliged when she asked for my number.

The first few times she called, my stomach knotted and I let the machine pick up. Later, I’d make up excuses for why I missed her call for the seventh time.

“I was potty-training Henry. In Syria. After rescuing him from the sex slave industry.

You know how it is.”

Eventually, I had to take her call. My inherent politeness told me it was the right thing to do. Taking the phone upstairs, I retreated to the bedroom so Henry couldn’t mock my social-stutter and nervous monotone.

Basically, she just talked while I sat, perched on the edge of the bed, desperate to end the call. She made me uncomfortable. She talked a lot about sex, and it’s not that I’m prude (I mean, obviously), but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth the way she was so intent on letting me know that she “wasn’t all-the-way-gay” and that even though she was supposed to be with Sylvia, she was still fucking random men.

“I fucked a black guy at [random amusement park] when I used to work there,” she bragged. Unbeknown to her, I was sarcastically clapping my hands.

Finally able to end the phone call, I went back downstairs and was met with Henry’s line of interrogation. “Well, how was it? What was she like?” he asked.

“Well. She sounds like a boy, first of all, and brags about sex like one, too,” I recounted. “She was annoying. A little cocky.” We really had very little in common, aside from that fateful joint-love for Teresa Strasser.

I went back to ignoring her phone calls, keeping the contact to online only. Too bad it didn’t stay that way.

That December, she learned that Sylvia had been cheating on her the whole time, but that was OK, because Christina was apparently “in love” with a man now. She started posting love poetry again and there were times when I had to  read some of the lines twice because it seemed like she was calling me out. Then Sylvia joined LiveJournal so Christina’s posts suddenly turned into big pools of lesbian love jizz.

Meanwhile, she was hitting me up on AIM, griping about how she was trapped with a girl for whom she felt no love.

“So break up with her,” I’d say, not knowing that in the next six years, I would utter that statement enough times to fill Michelle Duggar’s stretched out vagina.

Mar 182010
 

I did a bad thing. When my so-called friend Christina fucked up for the last time back in November, I held my head high and acted like I was cool with it, like it didn’t bother me that she had fucked me over yet again. But it caught up with me last month and since then I’ve run the gamut of emotions. The worst of it caused me to spend my days chasing an appetite and my nights crying on Henry’s shoulder. I emailed her sporadically, and she wouldn’t answer. I knew that she was back with her pathetic girlfriend, that this was why she played the “I’m just too fucked up to be friends with anyone, I need to get my life together” card last November. Her girlfriend would never allow us to be friends, and obviously being in an abusive relationship with a disgusting human being was more important than staying true to herself and her feelings.

Henry actually talked to her last week, said she sounded unhappy. She told him she thinks about me everyday and to tell me that “it’s not over.” Well, la-de-da. Let me sit here and wait for you to murder your girlfriend (would not be surprised if that happened) and then come running back to me covered in blood. Fuck you.

“Please tell Erin not to tweet or blog about this phone call,” she begged Henry. Because her girlfriend Sylvia is so devoid of TRUST that she creeps on every single thing I write on the Internet, checks Christina’s phone and probably reads her emails too.  What a great relationship! Where do I get one of those?

Well, that was all I needed. I asked her one last time to talk to me, to give me the answers I feel, after seven years, I deserve. And now? Now I’m just angry. And ready to tell the story. Every sordid detail, starting from the beginning.

Consider this a prologue. There is a lot I have to say, and it will take a lot of time, and there will be times that I don’t come across so favorably. There will be times aplenty where you will want to comment and say, “Why didn’t you just end it?” and I will tell you now that my reply will always be “I’m not quite sure, I guess because I’m a sadist.” I am sure I will at some point receive a barrage of hate mail from the Christina Camp. But I’m willing to risk that for the sake of getting this 1,000 pound hog off my chest. I am done letting this piece of shit hurt me and invalidate my feelings. By writing this, it will forever ensure that this is the end. No more take-backs. No more I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it ‘s.

This coffin has needed a nail since 2004. I’m here now with a few dozen.

So, if you like the stench of dirty laundry and want a behind the scenes look at the emotional luggage to which I’ve been handcuffed for the last 7 years, then this is for you.

I want to thank everyone who has been supporting me and encouraging me to do this.